A post you keep improving
The stowing post has not changed since it shipped. You do the ritual, carry the heartwood home, build the post, and that is it. You earn the thing and then the thing just sits there.
So there are three pieces now. Each is built on the ground next to a post, and each changes what that post does.
- A creel rail. The post holds twice as much, and its spirit carries twice as much in a trip.
- A spirit perch. A second spirit lives in it, so two of them are in the air at once.
- A hod jib. Crafting at a bench near the post counts what is in the chests around it, and spends out of them.
You do not put anything into any of them. They are not containers.
Why they stand next to it
Because that is how this game tends to tell you what a station can do. A workbench with a chopping block and a tanning rack beside it is a better workbench, and you learn that by walking up and looking at it.
A menu would have been less work for me. I also didn't want a post somebody had poured three heartwoods into to look exactly like the one they finished yesterday.
Creel rail
A low rail with baskets hanging off it. The post holds 24 things instead of 12, and its spirit carries 20 a trip instead of 10.
It took three goes to find a shape, and the failures are more interesting than the answer. The first set were shelves and bins, which is the obvious reading of "it holds more" and looked like furniture nobody would ever choose to build. So I went the other way and drew a barrow, a winch and a cellar hatch, which were better objects and belonged in some other game. Neither lot was a modelling problem. Each of them said the right thing about capacity and the wrong thing about where it was standing. Baskets on a rail was the third attempt and the first that looked like it had been made by whoever made the post.
Taking the rail away again shrinks the post, and that is the one place this could have gone badly. It will not empty your slots onto the floor. If what is in there does not fit the smaller grid, the post keeps the bigger one until you have moved enough out.
Spirit perch
A small lantern house on a pole with a second spirit living in it. Two carry stacks to your chests instead of one.
I wrote down a while back that I would rather have a second spirit than a faster one, and I still think that. Watching two of them work is worth something. Turning the speed up is a config number.
Hod jib
Stand at a workbench, forge or cauldron near a post that has one of these, and the recipe list counts what is in the chests around that post. Craft, and it takes from them. The spirit flies over from the chest to your bench afterwards, which is decoration. The crafting already happened.
A hod, if you were wondering, is the open trough a labourer carries mortar up to a bricklayer in.
I avoided building this for a long time. Craft from container mods are everywhere and they are also the quickest way to flatten this game. If you can reach every chest from the first minute then the early game stops asking you to plan a trip, and planning the trip is most of what the early game is.
What it will not do
The line I am trying to draw is between carrying things and deciding things. Walking the same twenty iron from the same chest to the same forge is not a decision, it is a toll. Whether you can afford the armour at all, or whether the coal lasts the night, is the game.
- Building still spends what is in your own pack. Nothing gets fetched for a wall.
- Smelters and kilns still want carrying by hand. Fuel is a system worth keeping.
- It cannot reach a chest you could not open yourself.
That is where I put the line. I am not claiming it is the only sensible place for it.
What the bosses have to do with it
The jib only works for biomes whose boss you have killed. Before Eikthyr it does nothing at all. After him it will fetch your wood and stone and flint. Copper and tin come with the Elder, iron and the sea with Bonemass, and the Ashlands open when Fader goes down. That it ends up completely open is on purpose. That far in you have done the work, and I do not think you should still be walking ore across a room.
The obvious alternative was to leave it ungated and make it expensive instead, and that does not work. A cost only decides when you can build the thing. Price the jib at black metal and you build it after Yagluth, by which point meadows through plains are open to you anyway, so the restriction withholds two biomes for an evening and then quietly stops existing. The gate follows you the whole way up instead, and it is still saying no to the Mistlands on the night you get there.
Which biome a thing belongs to is almost never written down by hand. It comes out of the game's own tables: the vegetation list puts tin deposits on Black Forest shores, the deposit says it drops tin ore, so tin ore is a Black Forest thing, and bars and cooked food take their answer from what they are made of. A handful of things no table reaches are listed by hand. The reason not to just keep the list is that a list is a copy, and a copy starts being wrong the first time anything moves. Yoke already worked this out for stack sizes, and doing it properly here turned up three bugs in that code.
The Deep North
The table has a row per biome with a boss against each. There is no row for the Deep North, and a biome with no row falls through as open. So its armour, capes, staffs and food come out of a chest right now with nothing killed at all, which is the one thing this mod is supposed to never do.
I found that writing the paragraphs above. The code had been consistent with itself for weeks and there was nothing to trip over until the rule was set down as a sentence. It gets a row before this ships.
What they cost
They are meant to arrive at four different points in a game rather than all at once. The post lands out of the Black Forest, the two that change how it works wait on the swamp, and the one that doubles it for good waits on the mountain. The post moves too: its nails become bronze.
| Piece | Cost | Lands in |
|---|---|---|
| Stowing post | 40 fine wood, 20 bronze nails, 1 heartwood | Black Forest |
| Hod jib | 35 fine wood, 10 iron nails, 2 chain, 1 heartwood | Swamp |
| Creel rail | 25 fine wood, 10 iron nails, 8 leather scraps | Swamp |
| Spirit perch | 25 fine wood, 6 iron nails, 6 silver, 1 heartwood | Mountain |
Three of the four want a heartwood, so a post with everything on it is three saplings. The rail asks for none, which felt right for the one that only makes the post bigger. None of these numbers have been played with. They are where I would start, not where anything ended up.
On a server
A chest is looked after by one player's game at a time, and that machine is the only one whose copy is authoritative. So when the jib needs twenty wood out of a chest somebody else's game is holding, your game does not reach in and take it. It asks. That side looks at what is really in the chest, removes what it can, and answers with the amount it actually got. Your craft is paid for out of the answer rather than out of what your screen was showing.
Which matters when two people craft from one chest in the same second. Both screens say twenty planks. If both games helped themselves, both crafts would succeed and the chest would have paid for one of them. That is what the code does. Whether it does it correctly with two real players and a real connection between them is a different sentence, and I cannot write that one yet.
Where it is
All three pieces are implemented and the branch compiles. None of it has been played, not once, so everything above is a design I believe in rather than one an evening has argued with. The Deep North row is not written. Nothing on the server has changed.